Booktalk

         To read about the slums of Mumbai is not only to be humbled, it is to visit a dystopian reality that ticks along on the same clock as ours. The cataclysms that provide the conflict for this tale are both our headlong global economy and an ingrained, nearly instinctual, caste system butting up against it. But it is corruption and it’s fetid atmosphere that stifles life even more.

    Beyond the Beautiful Forevers follows the lives of several bottom-dwelling inhabitants of the cesspool beyond the palaces of the Mumbai International Airport. If we were to substitute the adversity of prehistoric hunter-gatherers for the harrowing edge of existence these people endure, it might be easier to see their survival as heroic.

    But Catherine Boo does not whitewash the filth, the hunger, or the in-fighting that hobbles these garbage-pickers of the global machine. It is not their marginalization or the blight of the caste system or the sheer scope of their deprivation that she exposes. Rather it is the business-as-usual corruption that scums every aspect of their lives that she documents as the dystopian flaw that makes their world beyond hopeless.

    Teachers, doctors, neighbors, policemen, politicians, everyone we encounter in these lives condemns or exonerates actions for a dollar. It is ruinous. Yet the people fight to survive.

    When you fight for your life, I’m not sure hope is the driving force. In this book, survival, facing the next day, needs to come from something more visceral. With little promise of a future - days, weeks or years ahead -the action of living in nearly involuntary; like the mysteries of our lungs and heart.

    To see humans prying a life for themselves at this level is to peer into a place within ourselves that is not totally dark, but burning with a tireless spark to live.